21-year-old leads digitization of 14,000 tapes preserving Somaliland’s heritage

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Saturday January 4, 2025

Hafsa Omer organizes a collection of cassette tapes at the Hargeysa Cultural Center, where she leads the digitization of over 14,000 recordings to preserve Somaliland’s rich cultural and historical legacy. CREDIT / First Post

Hargeisa (HOL) — Amid the hum of a small cassette player, 21-year-old Hafsa Omer is working to preserve the voices and stories of Somaliland’s cultural and historical legacy by digitizing thousands of cassette tapes containing decades of music, poetry, and personal accounts that encapsulate the region’s identity.

Hafsa Omer, a social worker and manager of the digital archival project at the Hargeysa Cultural Center, has undertaken the painstaking task of digitizing a collection of more than 14,000 cassette tapes. These tapes, spanning over 50 years, are a treasure trove of Somaliland’s musical, cultural, and political history.

“People don’t see these things as important, but I do because my people—they don’t write, they don’t read—all they do is talk.”

The collection includes rare recordings of Somali National Movement (SNM) meetings, 1970s counterculture music, and even private messages exchanged during the war. Some tapes chronicle the daily lives of ordinary Somalilanders, while others feature iconic plays and poetry critiquing the authoritarian regime of Siad Barre.

For Hafsa, the project is deeply personal. Among the tapes is a recording from 1985, in which her late aunt Khadija shares family news and recounts the hardships of war.

The effort is vital for a nation whose history has largely been passed down orally. Somaliland declared independence from Somalia in 1991 but remains internationally unrecognized. For a region striving to assert its identity on the global stage, preserving its cultural legacy is more important than ever.

The Hargeysa Cultural Center, where Omer works, was founded in 2014 by Jama Musse Jama, a mathematician who envisioned a space dedicated to preserving Somaliland’s heritage. The Center houses over 10,000 cassettes collected from abandoned music studios, diaspora donations, and private collections smuggled out during the war.

“You find tapes that were recorded underground,” Jama explained. “Groups of people would gather, sitting together in secret sessions, often just friends talking about politics. These were things they couldn’t say publicly because of the dictatorship.”

In addition to archiving these recordings, the Center promotes youth engagement with heritage through workshops, exhibitions, and festivals, including the renowned Hargeysa International Book Fair.

The project also preserves recordings from Somaliland’s golden era of music in the 1970s and 1980s. This was when the region flourished as a hub for poetry, plays, and music, with artists using their work to celebrate love, critique oppression, and inspire resistance.

Digitizing the tapes is a monumental task. As of now, fewer than 5,000 cassettes have been cataloged, and only 1,100 have been digitized. The process involves carefully playing each tape to assess its contents and converting it to a digital format.

The effort faces societal resistance as well. Hafsa notes that Somaliland’s post-war conservatism sometimes clashes with the liberal artistic expressions found in the tapes. “Even my mother would scold me for listening to music instead of the Quran,” Hafsa shared.

Yet, her work continues to gain attention. In addition to local support, the initiative has drawn international recognition, with journalists and scholars commending the effort to preserve Somaliland’s rich cultural heritage.

Hafsa and her team hope to create a digital library that Somalilanders at home and abroad can access, ensuring these voices remain part of the national identity.

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